Friendship Makes Life Worth Living

<p>By now you may have read the viral story about <a href='https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/12/14/lin-wang-charles-barkley'>the unexpected friendship between Charles Barkley and the late Lin Wang</a>, a cat litter scientist from Iowa. It’s a pretty moving example of the power of connection, how one of the greatest basketball players of all time met and befriended a stranger in a hotel bar, and how despite their two very different lives, they became sources of great comfort and companionship to each other (and support too—as Wang attended the funeral of Barkley’s mother and Barkley later gave the eulogy at Wang’s funeral). </p><p>The Stoics don’t talk enough about friendship, and that’s a shame, because friendship makes life worth living. </p><p><a href='https://dailystoic.com/meditations-marcus-aurelius/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=worth-living'>Marcus speaks a lot</a> about being kind to your fellow man—including all the jerks out there—but we don’t hear much about the pleasures of spending time in the company of people we love. He talks about avoiding false friendship but says less about the benefits of <em>true</em> friendship. <a href='https://dailystoic.com/letters-from-a-stoic/?utm_source=convertkit&amp;utm_medium=convertkit&amp;utm_campaign=worth-living'>From Seneca</a>, we have many letters he wrote to a friend and we can see clearly how therapeutic and deep their relationship was. He writes occasionally on friendship in those letters and in essays, saying at one point that, “no one can live happily who has regard to himself alone and transforms everything into a question of his own utility; you must live for your neighbour, if you would live for yourself.”</p><p>It was Cicero, though, who wrote most eloquently on friendship, producing in 44 BC a fictional dialog between Gaius Laelius and his sons-in-law, where Laelius speaks movingly of his multi-decade friendship with the late Scipio Africanus (recently re-published by Princeton University Press as <a href='http:/